Fail to Prepare then Prepare to Fail: Rethinking Threat Vulnerability and Mitigation in the Precolumbian Caribbean

The islands of the Caribbean are a particularly interesting geographical region to examine the dynamic relationship between past human communities and sudden environmental change. This chapter examines how past peoples, living on the islands in the Caribbean Sea, were vulnerable to a number of environmental threats. The focus of this chapter is the impact of floods, droughts, and wind shear created by relative sea level rise, precipitation change, and hurricane activity. These hazards were identified as particularly relevant to current debates, given the predicted increase in the risk of such hazards in the near future (Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre 2009; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007). The potential Precolumbian mitigation of these hazards through the development of household architecture, settlement location, food procurement strategies, and networks of community interaction is explored in this chapter; and the relative success in mitigating impact and avoiding disaster is considered. This chapter reviews different scales of analysis, from the global, regional, national, and local, to extract key themes for comparative discussion. These research themes are then examined in more detail using a case study area in north-central Cuba where the author has conducted interdisciplinary collaborative research with Cuban and international colleagues since 2002. F o u r